Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin Press). This swirling intellectual history places the Israeli regime’s invocation of the Holocaust to justify its assault on Gaza in a provocative global context. Noting that, “for an overwhelming majority of the world’s population,” decolonization—rather than the Holocaust—was “the central event of the twentieth century,” Mishra draws parallels between militant Zionists, Hindu nationalists, and even white supremacists, stressing the way that “siege mentalities come to be mutually intensifying.” He fears that the “survivalist psychosis” of Israel’s leaders may portend “the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.” Instead, he urges, we must seek “affiliations that cut across politically defined borders” and a recognition of “indivisible suffering” and shared humanity.

Cold Kitchen, by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury). Primarily unfolding in the kitchen of an Edinburgh apartment, this cozy memoir offers rich descriptions of international foods stored in the pantry and cooking on the stove. But “a kitchen is a portal,” Eden writes. These domestic scenes spark recollections of visits to Central Asia—Istanbul, Riga, Siberia—and each chapter closes with a recipe for a now familiar dish. In the book’s strongest moments, Eden gestures toward the political significance of her culinary escapades abroad. At a café in Poland, she reflects on the legacy of the Second World War; in Kyrgyzstan, she ventures out for clover dumplings in the aftermath of protests there. In so doing, she asserts that food can be as valuable as a place’s “history, architecture and civic life.”

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Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito (Liveright). Winifred, the protagonist of this Victorian-era grotesque, takes a position as a governess at an English manor. The lady of the house, Mrs. Pounds, has instructed her to cultivate “good moral character” in her children, but Winifred senses “a Darkness” in Mrs. Pounds, one that she herself shares: it “rests within my rib-cage, a jailed animal grown listless with domestication.” Vandalism and lechery are among the milder affronts that occur on Winifred’s watch, and her narration, though sombre, sparkles. “It fascinates me,” Winifred reflects, “that humans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at will, but for the most part, choose not to.”

Code Noir, by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull). This collection of “fictions”—many too strange to be called stories—is filled with disappearances, deaths, and gnomic pronouncements. Lubrin, a St. Lucian-born Canadian poet, writes that “the murderers in this draft are those who write the laws,” referring to the titular seventeenth-century French edict that governed the traffic and ownership of Black people. Text from these regulations appears between Lubrin’s pieces, hauntingly drawn over by the artist Torkwase Dyson. The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth: one work simply describes seventeen dogs, another features a mathematically gifted conch shell, and others are closer to poetry, with only a few plotless lines. The over-all effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.”